Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
tweet.

Danny Boyle's New Britain: conform and celebrate, or risk being cast out of polite society

Did you enjoy the Olympics opening ceremony? If you didn’t, it’s probably wise to keep it to yourself. After all, you don’t want to end up like Tory MP Aidan Burley, who has been denounced as “reprehensible”, “offensive” and even “incompatible with modern Britain” – wow – for having the temerity to tweet that he thought the ceremony was “leftie multicultural crap”. There is a profound irony at work here. The ceremony celebrated the openness and diversity of modern Britain and has been hailed as a wonderful spectacle of “inclusion”. Yet it seems our celebration of diversity does not extend to allowing any criticism of the ceremony itself; our inclusiveness does not mean we will include dissenting views on Danny Boyle’s vision of the New Britain. When it comes to the opening ceremony, you must conform and celebrate, or risk being cast out (of polite society).

The opening ceremony is speedily morphing into another “Diana moment”, into another instance when everyone is expected to kowtow before a new, unstuffy vision of Britain, and heaven help those who don’t. Following the death of Princess Diana, we were told that we had entered a post-traditional, emotionally-aware New Britain, and yet the expression of certain emotions – such as criticism of the cult of public mourning outside the various royal palaces – was frowned upon and censured. Now, similarly, we’re told that the opening ceremony was a watershed moment in our cultural life, confirmation that we are a post-Empire, totally chilled-out, open-minded nation, yet we’re not so chilled out that we can shrug off criticisms of the ceremony itself. If you opt out of this new vision of Britain, or even worse question it, there will be demands for you to be censured, even sacked. So much for diversity.

What we have in the post-ceremony debate is the enforcement of a new national script, a new national story, one in which everyone must dance around the NHS like it’s a sun god and smile approvingly as the Queen gets thrown out of a helicopter, in order to demonstrate that they are obediently modern and "with it". And anyone who fails to do this, anyone who, in the words of the Independent, makes “the ill-advised move” of publishing critical thoughts about the ceremony, is branded a dinosaur, a political reprobate, whose discomfort with the ceremony “speaks volumes about their incompatibility with modern Britain”. That is, they don’t really belong here, on these Isles of Wonder, where only those who accept the new vision of an open, diverse, tolerant Britain will be tolerated.